however high a mountain

However thick a bamboo grove is, a stream is free to flow through it.
However high a mountain is, a white cloud is free to drift over it.

"Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth."
 - Jorge Luis Borges

Time is the treasure, you tell me,
and the past is its hiding place.

I instruct our fictional children,
The past is the treasure, time

is its hiding place.
 - Gail Mazur
from Forbidden City
Forbidden City

"We will never be the same again. But here's a little secret for you - no one is ever the same thing again after anything. You are never the same twice, and much of your unhappiness comes from trying to pretend that you are. Accept that you are different each day, and do so joyfully, recognizing it for the gift it is. Work within the desires and goals of the person you are currently, until you aren't that person anymore, and everything changes once again."
Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Narrated by Cecil Baldwin
Welcome to Night Vale, Episode 75, Through the Narrow Place
October 1, 2015

"The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one.

He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame."
 - G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man

"It is still the same beginning. Life is ceaselessly altering, and there isn't a place in the world where we belong. Beginnings have no arrival, no final destination. Hope is homeless, but indomitable, flowing beneath an awning between glinting spots of light on the calm surface of the water. Bare and finely cut, shining with moist resin. A heart of poplar and spruce, light and thin enough to vibrate and resonate with everything that passes."
 - Jens Christian Grøndahl
An Altered Light



"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."
 - Annie Dillard

"So a little spring prays to the ocean, so the beating heart prays to the heart of the universe, so the little word prays to the great Logos, so a dust speck prays to the earth, so the earth prays to the cosmos, so the one prays to the billion, so human love prays to God's love, so always prays to never, so the moment prays to eternity, so the snowflake prays to winter, so the frightened beast prays to the forest silence, so uncertainty prays to beauty itself.

And all these prayers are heard."
 - Anna Kamieńska

Remember
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
 - Joy Harjo
She Had Some Horses

"When I was younger I thought my knowledge would increase with years, that it was steadily expanding like the universe. A constantly widening area of certainty that correspondingly displaced and diminished the reach of uncertainty. I was really very optimistic. With the passage of time I must admit that I know roughly as much as then, perhaps even slightly less, and with nothing like the same certainty. My so-called experiences are not the same as knowledge. It is more like, how shall I put it, a kind of echo chamber in which the little I know rings hollow and inadequate. A growing void around a scant knowledge that rattles foolishly like the dried-up kernel in a walnut. My experiences are experiences of ignorance, its boundlessness, and I will never discover how much I still don't know, and how much is something I believed."
 - Jens Christian Grøndahl



When you ask your lover what he is thinking,
aren't you really asking

Do I occur to you? do I take place?

Sometimes to walk toward anyone
is the wilderness.
 - Christina Davis
Border Patrol

><((((º>

"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
 - Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost



"Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one, the size of, say, a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it "popped in" (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool June afternoon, encouraged the image's weird arrival. I attempted to exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly trinkety and likely to surface (clover, penny, bottle cap), but the reindeer was stubborn. It was meaning to be found.

I suppose I might dig around a bit, psyche-wise, and find the reindeer representing/standing in for something delicate and hidden, meaningful in some way I cannot yet understand.

Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch shot out, like a hooked cane, into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the place the reindeer sprang from, that swampy, rampant, tundral field, offered this image, too: a cleanly flensed frog. Now the two images were overlapping, the frog's empurpled and milky-blue, skinned legs - and the whole and intact tiny-frog-sized reindeer.

Then came the smell of gingerbread, though maybe I'm misidentifying some flower's perfume, and while this whole sensation/ eidolon/charm wasn't about winter at all, many wintry things kept adding up.

To what, though? To what?

I am of two minds about knowing.
What if I thought about the images differently: simply, that they exist. Are out there embedded in shifting forms, and enter me, the moment's site of odd happenings. No irritable reaching, just Hello, Reindeer. Hello, Frog. Your absolute smallness. Your unexplained blues. All fact and reason just let go of.

These images are meaningful/I have no idea what these images mean. And what do I get if I push these very real-but-odd pictures up against the nothing-in-hand?"
 - Lia Purpura



"But if we could only see what philosophy sees, or what it ought to see, or what it would love to see … Imagine the light it would bring. The light would illuminate the ground - like a medieval manuscript - while some principle of reason might stand in the clearing, unveiled, disclosed, and available for the sort of careful reading that it would require."
 - Hugh J. Silverman



Swimming
Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when
the coyotes roam the streets as if they've always
owned the place and had come back inspecting now
for damage. But what hasn't been damaged? History
here means a history of storms rushing the trees
for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star -
worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another's
suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
I understand it should, which is meant to be
different, I'm sure of it, from that pleasure
Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
a ship foundering at sea, though more and more
it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
the jetty's black ghost-finger, how it calms
the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out - it can still
feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
I the raft they steady. It seems there's no turning back.
 - Carl Phillips



"I think to think. Not to be thought-full, or to reach a point of wisdom or acquire a grace of knowledge. I think for the sensuality of thought."
 - Ilyas Kassam



" … I can't quite shake the astonishment. I can't quite believe what my life keeps teaching me, that material existence is a thin veil thrown over a foundation of miracles so numerous and profound we almost invariably overlook them."
 - Martha Beck



"As soon as we start looking through the outer and visible to the inner and invisible and trying to see how form and meaning relate, most of the old body/soul dichotomy vanishes. The soul then becomes the body's meaning, and the body the expression of the soul."
 - Karlfried Durckheim



"Many people used to believe that angels moved the stars. It now appears that they do not. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in angels. Many people used to believe that the 'seat' of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen 'the soul'. As a result of this and like revelations, many people do not now believe in the soul. Who could suppose that angels move the stars, or be so superstitious as to suppose that because one cannot see one's soul at the end of a microscope it does not exist?"
 - R. D. Laing
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise



Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
what touches me
As though I didn't exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don't know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.
 - Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow



"All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds - whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock then looking around as though to make sure he's alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard - perhaps you understand - to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky."
 - Mary Oliver
A Thousand Mornings


<°))))><

"I had this sudden awareness, she continues, of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we're conscious of having lived them. It's only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it's more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.

You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars. I remember how when I was a kid, I actually expected to be able to look up and see Pegasus spread out against the night. And when I couldn't, it seemed like a trick had been played on me, like a fraud. I thought, hey, if this is all there is to it, then I could reconnect the stars in any shape I wanted. I could create the Ken and Barbie constellations …

I realize we can never predict when those few special moments will occur, she says. How ... there are certain people, not that many, who enter one's life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that's what falling in love means … the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves."
 - Stuart Dybek
Paper Lantern



Peridot
I awoke in an ecstasy.
The sky was the color of a cut lime
that had sat in the refrigerator
in a plastic container
for thirty-two days.
Fact-checkers, check.
I am happy.
Notice I speak in complete sentences.
Something I have not done since birth.
And the sky responds.
 - Mary Ruefle
Trances of the Blast



"I mused that time is not only a river, but a river that constantly breaks its banks so you must flee from it as it covers everything behind your back, flee into the future, empty-handed, dispossessed, as the river obliterates your footsteps with each stride you take, each time you pass from one moment to the next."
 - Jens Christian Grøndahl



"To open our eyes, to see with our inner fire and light, is what saves us. Even if it makes us vulnerable. Opening the eyes is the job of storytellers, witnesses, and the keepers of accounts. The stories we know and tell are reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night, the unseen."
 - Linda Hogan



"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity - yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven."
 - Walt Whitman



"The natural state is just itself and nothing else, whether thoughts are arising or not. There is nothing wrong with having thoughts; it is natural for thoughts to arise. They represent the creative potentiality or dynamism of the nature of mind. When we are in the natural state, there are no special thoughts associated with it. The natural state is always there whether thoughts are present or not. The problem is to recognize this natural state without being distracted by thoughts."
 - Lopön Tenzin Namdak



To the Soul
Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering

is your answer
the question itself
surviving the asking
without end
whose question is it
how does it begin
where does it come from
how did it ever
find out about you
over the sound
of itself
with nothing but its own
ignorance to go by
 - W. S. Merwin
Present Company



"In summer, waiting for night, we'd pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we'd all yell, "Lights!"

"Lights!" we'd keep on yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate - the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we'd see his red taillights blink on.

But there were times - who knows why? - when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we'd hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: "Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!"
 - Stuart Dybek



The crowns of trees shake in warm
currents of air. Unattainably distant mountains.
Intangible rainbows. Huge cliffs of clouds
flowing slowly through the sky. The sumptuous,
unattainable afternoon. My life,
swirling, unattainable, free.
 - Adam Zagajewski
from Fruit
Without End



"Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb."
 - Stuart Dybek


><((((º>
"When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves, never quite 'with' ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions -  we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives."
 - Thomas Merton



"The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices."
 - Clarice Lispector



lodged

among the words, beneath
the skin of images: nerves,

muscles, rivers
of urgent blood, a mind

secret, disciplined, generous and
unfathomable.
 - Denise Levertov
Williams: An Essay



Life on Earth is quite a bargain.
Dreams, for one, don't charge admission.
Illusions are costly only when lost.
The body has its own installment plan.

And as an extra, added feature,
you spin on the planets' carousel for free,
and with it you hitch a ride on the intergalactic blizzard,
with times so dizzying,
that nothing here on Earth can even tremble.

Just take a closer look:
the table stands exactly where it stood,
the piece of paper still lies where it was spread,
through the open window comes a breath of air,
the walls reveal no terrifying cracks
through which nowhere might extinguish you.
 - Wislawa Szymborska
from Here
Here



"The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are."
 - Rebecca Solnit



"When you wake up in the morning, consciousness dawns. In this state of being conscious, you perceive a body, mind and world. These are appearances only, not what you are. To identify oneself with any of those appearances gives rise to the notion of being a separate person, self or individual entity. This is the cause of all seeking, suffering and doubts. Being conscious is a state that comes and goes. In sleep, unconsciousness or death, the experience of being conscious subsides. So it is clearly a transitory state. However, before you awoke and became conscious of anything else, including the fact of being conscious, you were there. Consciousness happened to you who were there to experience it. Your original, fundamental position is prior to consciousness. This "prior to consciousness" identity that you are cannot be named at all. From this unnameable, non-conceptual source, which is your original, innate nature, arises the sense of conscious presence. This is also the sense of being, the experience that "I am", or the bare fact of knowing that you are. This is the first appearance or experience upon your original state. Within this consciousness state emerges the mind, the body and the entire world of appearances. Little can be said about your original state because it is clearly beyond all concepts and even prior to consciousness. Some pointers that have been used are: non-conceptual awareness, awareness unaware of itself, pure being (beyond being and non-being), the absolute, the unmanifest, noumenon, cognizing emptiness, no thing - to name only a few. This non-conceptual awareness or being IS what you are. It is pure non-duality or unicity in which both subject and object are merged. Just as the sun does not know light because it IS light, so you do not know your original nature (as an object) because you ARE THAT. It is forever beyond the grasp of concepts and subject-object knowledge. Yet it is entirely evident and inescapable as that in you (which is you) that allows you to say with utter certitude "I am" and "I know that I am". Even when those words subside, you ARE. Even when the consciousness that knows those words subsides, you ARE. Consciousness is the light of creation. But you, as the unnameable source, are the primordial awareness, being or no thing (call it what you will) in which consciousness comes and goes."
 - John Archibald Wheeler



"... We don't give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say 'this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,' to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this."
 - Neal Stephenson
Anathem



"Zen is feeling your way along in the dark. You might think it would be better to have more light, to know where you are going, and to get there in a hurry, but Zen is feeling your way along in the dark. Then you are careful and sensitive to what is happening."
 - Shunryu Suzuki



"The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after."
 - Natalie Babbitt



  And then there was only
this story.
It followed me home

and entered my house -
a difficult guest
with a single tune

which it hums all day and through the night -
slowly or briskly,
it doesn't matter,

it sounds like a river leaping and falling;
it sounds like a body
falling apart.
 - Mary Oliver
from Night and the River
Red Bird

<°))))><

Dear god, it is years since I've prayed.
I understand the birds are holy.
I understand the body leads us to love, or

this is one way of knowing the world.
 - Stacie Cassarino
from Northwest
Crazyhorse



"One of the saddest realities is most people never know when their lives have reached the summit. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago. The walk together in the December snow, the phone call that changed everything, and that lovely evening in the bar by the Aegean. Back then you thought "this is so nice." Only later did you realize it was the rarest bliss."
 - Jonathan Carroll



To Be Human Is To Sing Your Own Song
Everything I can think of that my parents
thought or did I don't think and I don't do.
I opened windows, they shut them. I pulled
open the curtains, they shut them. If you
get my drift. Of course there were some
similarities - they wanted to be happy
and they weren't. I wanted to be Shelley and I
wasn't. I don't mean I didn't have to avoid
imitation, the gloom was pretty heavy. But
then, for me, there was the forest, where
they didn't exist. And the fields. Where I
learned about birds and other sweet tidbits
of existence. The song sparrow, for example.

In the song sparrow's nest the nestlings,
those who would sing eventually, must listen
carefully to the father bird as he sings
and make their own song in imitation of his.
I don't know if any other bird does this (in
nature's way has to do this). But I know a
child doesn't have to. Doesn't have to.
Doesn't have to. And I didn't.
 - Mary Oliver
Blue Horses



"Today it rained hard for much of the afternoon. It got dark fast, let go a hard, final downpour, and now the streets are clear and sharp-smelling. The light, these long last days of summer, is low enough to jewel and yellow, blur, and now, if I tilt my head, rainbow all the drops hanging from the phone line. It's that the colors weight the drops, slick them with fire and sea greens in shifts.

I walk through this rain thinking at one time I would point this all out to you in person, hold these drops on the wire against those astral stalks, iridesce the water, roll a pearly drop toward you, fray and sift asparagal light. But now you live in another city and you, in another country, and you (who have not yet even made an appearance here) and I no longer speak of such things.

But I want the shine to live. And before I know it, I am offering, tilting into the light and bringing forth . . . something: fine beads aloft, an abacus of pearls, say. I'm sowing some new green, but it's for you, Reader, whom I both know and do not know, who both exist and do not exist, who constitute an elsewhere far, further than I can imagine, years, maybe centuries away.

Whose elsewhere is a balm and a comfort."
 - Lia Purpura
Rough Likeness



"Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving.

Moreover the writer invents himself as a character in this form. He shapes himself from the shards of the everyday, from the truth of that daily life. Which is also a truth not to be scorned."
 - Anna Kamieńska
In That Great River: A Notebook



It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
 - Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Art of Disappearing



This is what is wrong: we, only we, the humans, can retreat from
ourselves and
                                                                                     not be
                                                                                     altogether here.
We can be part full, only part, and not die. We can be in and
out of here, now,
at once, and not die. The little song, the little river, has banks.
We can pull up
                                                                                      and sit on the banks.
We can pull back
from the being of our bodies, we can live a
portion of them, we can be absent, no one can tell.
 - Jorie Graham
from Other
Overlord



"Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist."
 - Rebecca Solnit



August rushes by like desert rainfall,
A flood of frenzied upheaval,
Expected,
But still catching me unprepared.
Like a matchflame
Bursting on the scene,
Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.
Like a dream
Of moon and dark barely recalled,
A moment,
Shadows caught in a blink.
Like a quick kiss;
One wishes for more
But it suddenly turns to leave,
Dragging summer away.
 - Elizabeth Maua Taylor



Summer sings its long song, and all the notes are green.
But there's a click, somewhere in the middle
of the month, as we reach the turning point, the apex,
a Ferris wheel, cars tipping and tilting over the top,
and we see September up ahead, school and schedules
returning. And there's the first night you step outside
and hear the katydids arguing, six more weeks
to frost, and you know you can make it through to fall.
Dark now at eight, nights finally cooling off for sleep,
no more twisting in damp sheets, hearing mosquitoes'
thirsty whines. Lakes of chicory and Queen Anne's lace
mirror the sky's high cirrus. Evenings grow chilly,
time for old sweaters and sweatpants, lying in the hammock
squinting to read in the quick-coming dusk.
A few fireflies punctuate the night's black text,
and the moonlight is so thick, you could swim in it
until you reach the other side.
 - Barbara Crooker

><((((º>
Cavalleria Rusticana
All the fireflies in the world
are gathered in our yard tonight,
flickering in the shrubs
like an ostentatious display
of Christmas lights out of season.
But the music in the air
is the music of heat, of August -
cicadas scraping out
their thin, harsh treble
like country fiddlers settling in
for a long night. I feel at home
with their relentless tune
minimalist, like the eighties.

Events repeat themselves,
but with a difference that makes all
the difference. As a child,
one summer night in Verona
at my first opera,
I watched a swarm of matches
light up the Roman arena
until we were silent. It was as if
music were a night-blooming flower
that would not open
until we held our breath.
Then the full-blown sound,
the single-minded combat
of passion: voices sharpening
their glittering blades on one another,
electing to live or die.
It was that simple. The story was
of no importance, the motive lost
in the sufficient, breathing dark.
If there was a moon I don't remember.
 - Lisel Mueller



These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge
the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it.
To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing
the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers.
The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light
and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us
wondrous and strange companion to all our days.
To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
to go out underneath it all above and sparkling
to step into it as into a large surf in late August.
 - Peter Gizzi



"I wanted to ask you about your vision of perfection in an imperfect world, or what side of the earth calls out to you when you touch a physical globe, or maybe about your greatest heartache and how you still go on as your world continues turning, or what you do with a memory once lodged inside your bones that's still breathing, and burning. But you're still a stranger, and I'm overly polite, so I'll ask all about your day when I'd rather know about your life."
 - Victoria Erickson



"Most of the time we go through the day, through our activities, our work, our relationships, our conversations, and very rarely do we ground ourselves in an awareness of our bodies. We are lost in our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our stories, our plans.

Pay attention to those times when you feel like you are rushing. Rushing does not have to do with speed. You can rush moving slowly, and you can rush moving quickly. We are rushing when we feel we are toppling forward. Our minds run ahead of ourselves; they are out there where we want to get to, instead of being settled back in our bodies. The feeling of rushing is good feedback. Whenever we are not present, right then, in that situation, we should stop and take a few breaths. Settle into the body again. Feel yourself sitting. Feel the step of a walk. Be in your body.

The Buddha made a very powerful statement about this: "Mindfulness of the body leads to nirvana." Such awareness is not a superficial practice. Mindfulness of the body keeps us present."
 - Joseph Goldstein



"Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary . . . of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call "reality": a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows - once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making "reality" this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that - but again, who knows? I would like to express it too."
 - Virginia Woolf



"Often times, a person will think they know you by piecing together tiny facts and arranging those pieces into a puzzle that makes sense to them. If we don't know ourselves very well, we'll mistakenly believe them, and drift toward where they tell us to swim, only to drown in our own confusion.
Here's the truth: it's important to take the necessary steps to find out who you are. Because you hold endless depths below the surface of a few facts and pieces and past decisions. You aren't only the ripples others can see. You are made of oceans."
 - Victoria Erickson



"If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong."
 - Umberto Eco
Numero Zero



A Million Shades
The soft, warm, gentle touch,
when late Summer meets early Autumn,
nothing can compare,
nothing can equal,
this wondrous, beautiful union,
when a tired, slumbering Summer,
and the awakening, boisterous Autumn,
unite,
and a soft, warm breeze,
blows a single leaf,
floating down,
the fore runner of millions,
golden and russet,
soft and brittle,
crisp and crunchy,
a carpet of a million shades,
a patch-work blanket,
to gently fall,
and sleep upon the land.
 - Ambrose Harte



"This strangely still pause between summer and autumn, greenery and gold, and the heat and rising wind that is once again readying itself to rush it all away in a climactic symphony of colour and scent is - in my opinion, one of the best parts of living on Earth."
 - Victoria Erickson



Next Time
Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
     or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more - the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
   like a light.
 - Mary Oliver

<°))))><

"Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?"
 - Annie Dillard



"In one of his insightful talks Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said that in your practice you should walk like an elephant.

ゆ

It means to move at a comfortable pace. No rushing toward a goal. No push to make it all meaningful. The sometimes inscrutable texts of Taoism and Zen teach that it's important to do what you do without trying to accomplish anything.

ゆ

You don't have to get anywhere. There are no goals and objectives: nothing to succeed in, and nothing in which to fail. You can sit in your house, as Thoreau did, and be attentive - his suggestion. "We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it - a little? . . . If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?"
 - Thomas Moore



"All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it - not to have such music inside one's head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?"
 - Mary Oliver
Long Life



"What opens inside you when you're willing to entertain the possibility that things maybe different than you thought they were is what I call the great internal space; a place where you come to know that you don't know. This is really the entry point into the end of suffering: when you become conscious of the fact that you really don't know. I mean that you don't really know anything -  that you really don't understand the world, you don't really understand each other, and you really don't understand yourself. This is such an obvious thing when we really take a moment and look around. When you look at the world that human beings have created and how we relate to each other, it's so obvious that we don't know anything at all.
Everybody's going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what's real and what's not, pretending they know what's right, pretending they know who's wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we are afraid of.  We don't really want to admit that nobody really knows."
 - Adyashanti



Inside the river is there a river? -
it could follow slow water the way
the real current follows a stiller
shore. And in your life the life that
hurries could pass, and pass its
open neighbor the earth, and its shore
the sky. To be here, and always to find
places in the current, the dreams
the river has - surely we bubbles
ought to tell about it?

Listen: One of the rooms the river has
after its bridge and its bend in the mountains
is a place waiting for the sun every
afternoon, when the sun dwells
at a slant under a log and finds
that little yellow room and a waterbug
trying to learn circles but never making
one its shadow approves. Miles later
the river tries to recall that dream,
turning with all of its twisting self
that found gravel and found it good.

Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.
 - William Stafford



"Around six in the evening, I doze on my bed. The window is wide open, the gray day has lifted now. I experience a certain floating euphoria: everything is liquid, aerated, drinkable (I drink the air, the moment, the garden). And since I happen to be reading Suzuki, it seems to me that I am quite close to the state that Zen calls sabi; or again (since I am also reading Blanchot), to the "fluid heaviness" he speaks of apropos of Proust."
 - Roland Barthes
Délibération



"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."
 - Graham Greene



"Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?"
 - Robert Adams

><((((º>